When Jean and Mohamed played Arab Songs at Share House again, I felt this joyful pain. Our two friends from Syria, one from a Christian, the other from a Muslim family, both played love songs in times of war. Longing. Longing for the fullness of life, the intoxication of love, the silence of hope. And grief. A country, a culture, Damascus, the oldest inhabited city on earth, destroyed. A sigh. A prayer. Resurrection.

In Jean’s Facebook pictures from before the war, he plays Western music for embassies in Syria, U2, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and he laughs. Now when we meet in Berlin, he laughs too, we laugh a lot together, but it’s as if our hearts have become wider. Through love, and through grief.

I could never stand grief. I avoid funerals, they are unbearable. Unless they are joyful celebrations, where people drink and eat, joke and dance, and the dead is resurrected at the end. But I never got an invitation to such a funeral, or any that was ever so announced. There’s something wrong in the way death is taken too seriously. Apart from that sadness makes me laugh. I can not explain it. Picture a very, very sad funeral, and me who constantly laughs, giggles and can hardly contain himself.

A few days ago I was hit with sudden sadness. I was infinitely sad. What hit me was a veritable symphony of sadness that began in my heart on a gray Saturday morning in Had there been since my youth Weltschmerz days ever such a solid and deep melancholy? Why? Was it the weather? The world situation? My bank account? Love? Or was perhaps the autumn, this icy Gray in front of the windows in early December when it gets dark again by three clock in the afternoon, as if the sun was too exhausted to shine?

Friends, quite honestly, if someone tells she or he does not feel good because of the weather, the upcoming low, the unbearable high, the felt wind chill, I think, get them to a nursing home. Sure, Umberto Eco claimed our civilisation is based on the fact of having to spend a lot of time indoors. As if people who like to be outside, have no culture. Nevertheless: The weather. Elke said the other day like a sad Russian poet: Everything dies. And then she pointed faintly at the last yellowing leaves on the trees. Nonsense! Life is full and fat and everything is illuminated! I would have answered her like Ishmael in Moby Dick. Two days later sadness hit me like a wall of bricks.

What had happened? Had it been Jean’s and Mohamed’s songs, was it autumn, or death and war, claiming beloved lives here and there, was it the shopping Christmas frenzy plus the grumpy neighbour who wrote letters of complaint because he wanted more love?

After ten years at the Southern tip of Africa, where it can be quite cold and gray, I found good old melancholy again in my old home Berlin, fat und fully wrapping me and not at all in a way sad. And grateful I realized that it’s not so bad to mourn sometimes. I am not speaking of whining or complaining. I am speaking of a graceful sentiment acknowledging that so much is terrible in the world and so much goes wrong. When I closed my eyes, it felt deepest sympathy with creation, a depth my sometimes superficial good mood could not reach. Sadness like a love song that wants it all, ecstasy, the stream of life, joy, sensuality, precious peace, and because it longs for it, it sings of the pain, as so much of it is not possible at the moment. Sigh.

Yes. After two days I made jokes again. Sure, savoring life, the depth of our being, and listening to the breath of the world. The Silence. Beautiful! And futility, sure, everywhere. But regarding that I keep it with James Bond. Hobby? Resurrection.